


One More Night

by onward_came_the_meteors



Series: Brucemas 2020 [7]
Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Bruce Banner Needs a Hug, Camping, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Friendship, Getting Together, M/M, Mutual Pining, POV Third Person, Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Post-Civil War Dynamics, Post-Thor: Ragnarok (2017), Steve Rogers Needs a Hug, Team Dynamics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-20
Updated: 2020-12-20
Packaged: 2021-03-10 22:07:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,339
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28194444
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/onward_came_the_meteors/pseuds/onward_came_the_meteors
Summary: After the events of Ragnarok, Bruce returns to Earth, but instead of landing in the Sanctum Sanctorum, he ends up finding the former Avengers... including a former captain.Turns out a lot has changed in two years, but maybe that change can be for the better.
Relationships: Bruce Banner/Steve Rogers, past Bruce Banner/Natasha Romanoff
Series: Brucemas 2020 [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2056074
Comments: 4
Kudos: 28
Collections: Brucemas 2020





	One More Night

**Author's Note:**

> I swear I had good intentions, but this fic strays so far from the prompt... ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
> 
> Day 7, for the Steve/Bruce pairing and the prompt "date night"

__

Bruce had known what he was signing up for. 

He’d seen Thor do it a million times. Raise Mjolnir to the skies, call for Heimdall, become engulfed in a burning blaze of rainbow light, and be instantly transported across the galaxy… universe… wherever the  _ hell  _ Asgard was in relation to Earth. 

(Or what used to be Asgard, anyway)

The return trips didn’t seem that different either: all those steps would simply happen in reverse, and boom—one instant thunder god, scourge of evil aliens and Tony Stark’s landscaping bills alike. 

And Bruce had already flown a spaceship through a crazy gladiator trash planet—not to mention flying a quinjet  _ to _ said crazy gladiator trash planet, even if he didn’t remember it and his faith in the Hulk’s piloting skills was slim to none—and traveled through a wormhole (he was not about to start calling it the Devil’s Anus; he was drawing a line and that was where it ended) to the space kingdom of Norse gods, so he figured he could handle using the Bifrost. 

Especially since it was his only option, unless he wanted to tag along with the Asgardians on their intergalactic house-hunting journey. After Asgard had been destroyed (it was bits and pieces to him, but he’d woken up on the Statesman basically covered with half-healed burns, and Thor and Valkyrie had filled in the rest), its former inhabitants needed a new home, and now that Thor was king, he’d resolved to search the galaxy for someplace large and unpopulated and welcoming to a shipful of shell-shocked Asgardians, an assortment of freed Sakaaran gladiators, and Loki. 

A tall order indeed. Especially for that last part, but Bruce hadn’t said that out loud. 

Thor had been very open— _ and… hopeful? _ —about his offer for Bruce to stay with them, and Bruce would be lying if he’d said he hadn’t been tempted, at least a little. Somehow, a long weekend in space mostly spent fighting the goddess of death, an immortal arena host, and each other had strengthened their bond more than three-odd years of Avenging ever had, and from what he’d already seen of the Asgardians, a giant green monster wouldn’t be at all freakish or frightening in their eyes. 

But he missed his home.

That was it, really: plain and simple. He missed Earth, he missed the Tower, and, well… he missed his friends. Now that he was himself again, really himself, the ache of their absence had burst forth in full force, as though the last few years of being alone had condensed his emotions and spilled them out again the moment he was free to think with his own brain. He might’ve been the reluctant Avenger initially (had any of them  _ not _ been reluctant?), but the whole being-part-of-a-team thing really grew on a person, and it had only been a short step from there to real friendship. 

So through the Bifrost it was. 

And one awkward half-wave-shoulder-clap-hug with Thor, nod to Valkyrie, tense eye contact with Loki, and crank of Heimdall’s sword later, Bruce was beamed up and shot through outer space at the speed of rainbow light.

Unfortunately, Bruce may have seen Thor use the Bifrost a million times, but it turned out that that didn’t necessarily translate well to the actual first-hand experience.

Simply put, Bruce Banner was not Thor, and not just in that he didn’t have a magical lightning hammer with which to strike epic poses as he emerged from a shimmering rainbow. When he did land, it was with the tail end of a yelp coming out of his mouth, his feet slamming hard into the ground, and skidding desperately before falling forward onto his hands and knees in the dirt.

Bruce spit grass out of his mouth and tried to remember how to blink. 

_ Ow. _

It took a moment before he could process anything else, and even then it happened slowly, only a few sensations returning at a time. There was warmth radiating over his back—the sun,  _ the sun _ , was it the same sun or had he been looking up at a different one all this time?—and the gentle rush of breeze blowing over his face. It smelled like forests. 

Lights popped and smudged in front of his eyelids as he tried to raise himself onto his elbows, and he wondered when he’d closed them. 

Everything spun for a good four seconds when he did open his eyes, but then it settled into shady leafy canopy and brown bark tree trunks and little slices of blue sky up above. 

Bruce felt the muscles in his face split into a grin. This was Earth. He was  _ on Earth again _ , and it didn’t matter if he was continents away from the team because he could travel that, he could make his own way across oceans and mountains, because distances here were measured in miles and not light-years. 

He shifted up into a sitting position, and that was when he realized he was sprawled out in a crater of dirt that was, for once, the size of his smaller body and not the Hulk’s. 

Oh well. It wasn’t like he wasn’t used to it.

Come to think of it, he wasn’t sure why the Hulk hadn’t come out again. He could only suspect that being launched through space at light speed had probably shocked him as much as it had shocked Bruce. 

Rainbows were still twirling in the corners of his eyes, and so at first he thought he was imagining the silhouette circling up above the trees.

That misconception was quickly corrected, however, when the big winged shape came hurtling out of the sky.

Bruce instinctively covered his head as he tried to struggle upright, but froze at the familiar-sounding  _ click _ .

_ Wait a damn second. _

There was a thud of footsteps against the ground, and the wings were folding up into a jetpack-like device, and a voice was calling out “Don’t move!” and Sam Wilson was stepping out of the sunlight.

Bruce almost sagged in relief, sending a silent thank-you to Heimdall—wherever he was, it was where the Avengers were (even if this forest was definitely  _ not _ a skyscraper in New York), and besides Thor, this was the first familiar face he’d seen in two years.

_ Not _ counting Loki.

He stood up and waved. “Hey, Sam! It’s me!”

Sam stopped a few feet from the edge of the crater, his eyes widening. “Doctor Banner?”

“Yeah.” Bruce wasn’t sure what else to say—he hadn’t seen Sam since the party at the Tower: that last moment before everything flipped sideways. He settled for, “It’s been a while.”

"No kidding,” Sam said. He looked over his shoulder and yelled, “Hey, guys? You gotta come see this.”

There was a faint rustling in the underbrush and Bruce glanced around, instinctively searching for glints of armor and uniforms and quivers, before he spotted the figure walking toward them.

This person didn’t send the same spark of familiarity that Sam had, and Bruce tensed for a moment before the person stopped dead and his eyes when they widened were a bright blue and it was _ Steve.  _

Steve, dressed in black tactical gear that didn’t look like a StarkTech design, without any sign of the shield, and with—

The words tumbled out of Bruce’s mouth before he could wrap himself around them. “You have a beard now?”

The sound of his voice was apparently enough to convince Steve that it was really him, because he took another step closer to the crater. The sun peeking out behind the leaves shone over his face, and Bruce thought about how this was  _ not Steve _ but it was Steve. It was, in the careful yet sure movements and the piercing gaze as he slowly crouched down in the grass, in the blond hair falling over his face and the unconcealed intensity that sent a little shiver through Bruce even now.

And somehow it was only then, when Steve had lowered himself down to Bruce’s level and was staring at him like he’d seen a ghost, that Bruce remembered he wasn’t wearing a shirt. 

Tony’s ridiculous tight jeans had somehow stretched enough to survive, but the shirt was long gone, and— _ why am I thinking about this?  _

Fortunately, Steve was either stunned enough or preoccupied enough not to comment (and why would he—everyone on the planet had seen Bruce naked), instead gingerly touching his face. “Yeah. Gotta keep my cover somehow.”

_ Cover? _ Bruce didn’t have time to ask, though, because Sam was grinning, unstrapping his Falcon goggles from his head as he said, “Oh, is that the story now?”

Steve ignored that too. He was still staring at Bruce, and Bruce wasn’t sure how much longer he’d be able to withstand the weight of that stare. “I didn’t think… I didn’t think you were coming back.”

Bruce winced. “Neither did I. I promise I never planned on leaving for…” He hesitated. “Two years?”

He was hoping Thor had been wrong, he was really, really hoping, but his hopes were dashed at Steve’s single nod. 

“Two years and about seven months.” The captain’s voice was apologetic, or trying to be, but there was something else in there, too—something heavier, something harder to voice aloud.

Bruce sighed. “Great.” And didn’t he just want to take that back as soon as he’d said it.

_ Maybe look who you’re talking to before you complain about missing two years, Banner. _

Steve opened his mouth like he wanted to say something else, but then closed it and instead stretched out an offering hand—to pull him out of the crater, Bruce realized belatedly. Because he was standing half-naked in a hole of dirt, and helping him out of it was the concerned-friend thing to do.

He forced his flinching muscles to relax. He didn’t really need the help—sure, he was tired, but for once it was regular-person tired (getting a good night’s sleep on the Statesman was a unique challenge when nighttime was essentially a construct and he was still wary of the god of mischief lurking around) and not recovering-from-a-transformation tired—but he suspected that Steve was working from muscle memory that Bruce was touched to see he still had, and so he accepted the hand and let Steve pull him up with what looked like absolutely zero effort. 

_ Almost forgot about that.  _ Bruce wobbled a little once he was fully upright, but the blinking rainbows in front of his eyes finally seemed to have disappeared, and he was able to steady himself easily enough. 

He expected Steve to withdraw his hand once Bruce was out of the hole, but the touch lingered for another second before Steve gave a little head shake and let go, taking a step back.

“So where were you?” Steve asked. “What happened? Why are you back now?”

Sam chimed in. “And is that freaky magic portal coming back to suck all of us up? Because if so, I’m backing up.”

“Probably not,” Bruce said, focusing on the simplest question first. He paused. “Maybe not? It’s controlled by Heimdall’s sword, so—”

He stopped, and all three of them turned at the barely perceptible sounds of another person making their way through the bushes—and somehow Bruce knew who it was going to be before his eyes fully registered it.

Natasha stepped out from behind a tree, her hair short and blond and her black gear matching Steve’s, but her carefully restrained expression achingly the same. He was pretty sure it was surprise, in this case, but what did he know?

Bruce hadn’t moved from right beside Steve and Sam, but suddenly the distance between him and everyone else seemed infinitely large. Like a chasm. He didn’t think it had ever been so quiet, not ever.

He cleared his throat. “Hi.”

“Hey.” Natasha nodded a bit as she spoke, but her eyes didn’t leave Bruce’s. It fit—he wasn’t sure he could look away from her either.

_ It was your message that brought me back after two years did you know that did you know you were the last thing I remembered the first thing I said do you know that everything is different now and I don’t know how to say any of it— _

There was a thin rumble in the back of his mind, but then it went silent, and Bruce was almost tempted to tug on that, to pull Hulk back out and let someone else deal with this for a while.

Grass rustled, and he heard Sam whispering to Steve: “Yeah, I’m backing up.”

__

* * *

Steve had no idea how in the world he was going to explain this… this  _ this _ of things to explain that seemed to grow bigger every time he thought about it for half a second. He’d never imagined he would have to—it had been him and Sam and Natasha (and Bucky, sometimes Bucky, but visits to Wakanda were always a risky thing and he’d already asked them too much) for so long that somehow he’d managed to fit everything into that worldview, pretend that it had always been this way, that this had been supposed to happen. 

Missions helped—yes, they still went on those; he might have left his shield behind, but he would never abandon his responsibilities: what had felt like his responsibilities for as long as he could remember, no matter whether or not he’d had the power to act on them—giving all of them something else to focus on, some goal to accomplish. He still believed the safest hands were their own, that there should never be a conflict of interest when it came to saving lives, but he couldn’t deny that it was significantly harder to do that as a scattered band of fugitives—and so he threw himself into it ever more determined. 

Explaining all of that, however—explaining it to  _ Bruce _ —that was a different story entirely.

It was just—he wanted to—he didn’t know  _ what _ he wanted. Bruce was  _ standing there _ , like nothing had happened, like he’d never left (although… he wasn’t wearing a shirt, and Steve was genuinely starting to question if he was aware of that)—a living, breathing reminder of what the old days had been like. Before he and Tony had gone and fucked it all up.

(He  _ and _ Tony. His pride could stand to admit that much now, even if he was fairly certain he wouldn’t be speaking to Tony Stark ever again)

And Bruce had been such an integral part of those old days: on the battlefield, off the battlefield, gesturing with a marker to a holographic map of possible scepter locations, poking at a tablet and pretending he wasn’t holding back laughter at whatever ridiculous bickering was going on around the table, blinking himself awake and trying to pay attention to the conversation on the quinjet after missions, wearing those stupid headphones all over the place, his eyes lighting up in  _ that way _ whenever he was talking about a new project he was working on in the lab with—

Ahem. 

Steve felt it suddenly, like a sharp ache somewhere in his rib cage: a longing for the way things used to be. He wasn’t a stranger to that feeling. He’d carried it around in some form or another since… since… a long time. He’d learned to push past it. In this line of work, there wasn’t much other choice.

But now Bruce was back, and every  _ what if what if what if  _ that he had steadily ignored since Siberia, since Germany, since the Accords, since Sokovia, came rushing back.

And he didn’t know how to deal with any of that, how to address it, how to do anything with it at all besides ball it up and stuff it down somewhere—hell, he didn’t even know what to say right now, now that everything was slapping him in the face and he was pulling Bruce out of a crater without even being sure he could remain upright himself. 

But no one else was talking, and they were all looking to him, and  _ damn it guys I told you I’m not the captain anymore. _

Steve’s unsteady breath ruffled his new beard. Something still had to be said, to break this awful stretching silence. “How about we get back to the campsite?” he asked. He indicated Bruce. “And then you can tell us what you’ve been up to.”

Bruce frowned. “Campsite?”

_ Crap.  _

Steve opened his mouth, but his mind had gone blank—and he didn’t want to  _ lie _ ; there was no point to that.

It was too late, anyway: Bruce, being Bruce, was already coming up with explanations. “So… did I interrupt a stakeout mission or did somebody finally convince you guys to take a vacation?”

He wished for a moment that Bruce wasn’t so smart, because even though Bruce was maintaining a smile as he said the words, his eyes were darting between the other three in turn, obviously knowing neither of those options were the case.

Fortunately, Natasha’s entire job used to be steering conversations away from uncomfortable topics, and Steve had never been so grateful to her as she said, somehow smoothly, “A lot’s happened. I think we all need to catch each other up, but how about we do so when we’re not out here?” She waved a hand around at the trees.

Steve nodded, barely a second before it would’ve been too late to do so. “Sounds good.”

Bruce nodded too, with slightly more hesitance. His gaze seemed to linger the most on Steve, and even though Steve wasn’t planning on meeting his eyes, he somehow did anyway.

They both looked away, however, when Sam spoke up and gestured to his wings. “I should tell you right now: we’re walking back. I’m not carrying three people with these.”

__

* * *

Unanimously, they decided that the trek back would be silent, and so the next words spoken were by Bruce.

“You guys have a quinjet out here?” he asked, walking up to where it was parked impressively well on the uneven terrain (all credit to Sam for that one). They had come to a little clearing, shaded by overhanging branches that also happened to be an excellent source of aerial cover.

Steve saw Bruce’s head turn just that little bit to peer inside the open door, as though he was expecting somebody else to pop out. Nobody did, and Bruce frowned before taking a step back.

“Did the New York City zoning committee finally declare the tower full of superheroes a hazard or is this just home sweet home now?” he asked. His hand brushed against the side of the jet and dropped back down. 

“The Avengers are based in the compound now,” Steve answered.  _ What’s left of them, anyway. _ “Upstate.”

Bruce nodded slowly. “I… think I remember that.”

The upturn at the end of his sentence sounded a little too much like a question, and Steve felt a sudden jolt. “You do remember things, right? I know sometimes after you’re the Hulk for a while, things tend to get… fuzzy…”

He tried and failed to shove the image of a black mask clattering onto a bridge and a familiar-unfamiliar voice shouting “ _ Who the hell is Bucky? _ ” out of his head. 

The relief was tangible when Bruce shook his head. “No, I’m fine. I mean, I don’t know everything that went on while I was the Hulk, but, um…” His eyes seemed to drift off into the distance for a bit, and his hands twisted together before he shook back into himself. “Yeah, no. Everything before is fine. It only starts to get blurry right after—”

That was where Bruce broke off, and accidentally-or-not glanced at Natasha. Steve hadn’t been told the details of what had happened—he barely even knew that  _ anything _ had happened, just that Bruce had gone in the building and the Hulk had come out of it. At the time, there had been many, many,  _ many _ other things to worry about, and Steve had mostly been relieved that there was another pair of hands ready to tackle the army of Ultrons. When neither the Hulk or Bruce came back, though… that was when he’d started to question the events leading up to their disappearance. But Natasha had never mentioned it, not even now that they had basically unlimited bonding time. 

To her credit, Natasha looked unruffled enough, but that didn’t mean anything. Steve had seen her carry on a conversation while nearly bleeding out from a bullet wound. 

“I’m not going to make excuses for that,” she finally said.

Bruce’s hands twisted together again. “That’s good.”

“But I would like to apologize.”

A crack. The smallest, almost imperceptible, crack.

“I understand why you did it,” Bruce said. “I just didn’t think you would…” He trailed off, unconsciously peeking inside the quinjet again, but when still nobody showed up, his gaze fell to Steve. “Hey, you guys  _ aren’t  _ on a mission, right? Because I’d really like to know what happened while I was gone, but I don’t want our recap session crashed by, like, a Hydra drone strike or something.”

Sam looked like he was giving the possibility serious thought. “Not at the moment.” His expression became serious, and he turned to Steve. “Cap, you wanna take this one?”

_ Nope. _

Steve steeled himself. “How about we do this inside?”

The four of them ended up sitting in a circle inside the jet: Sam in the pilot seat with his wings compartmentalized and leaning against the dashboard, and the other three spread in the seats along the walls. Steve sat down beside Natasha, unconsciously mirroring her pose—hands clasped low, elbows resting on bent knees—as Bruce found himself a spot on the seats across from them. 

Now that Steve’s field of view consisted almost entirely of Bruce Banner, he remembered something. “Oh yeah, d’you want to put on a shirt?”

Bruce reflexively looked down at himself. “Oh, right.”

Steve got up again, stepping past Natasha and crossing to the corner of the jet where he kept his stuff. They tried to keep the main area as clear as possible—for missions and for sanity—but it was inevitable that belongings piled up after nearly two years. Sleeping bags were rolled up on the floor, someone’s backpack slumped half-zippered against a seat, the works. He sifted around and came up with a gray hoodie, one that he’d worn the few times they’d deemed it safe enough to venture into a public place (Captain America tended to get recognized. Especially as an international fugitive).

He returned to his seat and started talking while Bruce pulled the hoodie over his head. “So. I guess you can see that we’re not at max capacity at the moment.”

Sam snorted. “That’s one way of putting it.”

“After you left…” Steve continued, then stopped. “Well, for starters, I’ll be completely honest: I have no idea where Thor is.”

“I do.” Bruce’s voice was muffled, his head still stuck in the oversized hood, but he pushed it down and began to explain. 

Steve didn’t know what he’d expected Bruce to be doing over the past two years, but he could feel his eyebrows lift closer and closer to his hairline at sentences like “—and then we had to escape the gladiator arena in a stolen spaceship—” or “—but of course I didn’t  _ know _ that until the giant holographic guy started talking, and that guy was obviously bad news, but Thor said I lived in his house? In a hot tub? I’m not really sure—” or “—so I jumped out, because I felt like I had to, you know? But Hulk didn’t come out at first and I  _ think _ I might’ve broken my spine a teeny bit, so we can add that to the list of things I can’t die from—”

He was also pretty sure Bruce had mentioned Loki a couple of times, and… yeah, he did not want to deal with that. 

At the end, Sam was the first one to speak. “That’s a lot.”

Bruce nodded. “Yeah, I kinda get that more now.” He paused. “So. What happened with you guys?”

The  _ and everybody else _ went unspoken.

“Well, none of us destroyed planets or fought in intergalactic gladiator rings,” Steve said.  _ Small comfort _ , his annoying mind provided him with, and he shoved that away. He had to start small. Maybe work his way up to the big stuff. Definitely not an attempt to delay the inevitable. “Clint… Clint’s under house arrest.”

Bruce blinked. “I mean—I can see it, but how, specifically, did that happen?”

“He got the same deal as that Lang guy,” Sam provided. “You know—” his fingers formed air quotes “—’Ant Man.’”

“What?”

Natasha shook her head quickly. “Don’t worry about it.”

Steve continued. “Vision and Wanda went off the grid.”

“Wanda Maximoff?” Bruce’s face was very hard to figure out, and Steve remembered, with an inward kick at himself, what had gone down back in South Africa (it was hard, it was so hard to try and reconnect himself with Bruce’s brainspace… all the things that had come and gone and went were still brand new or unknown to him, even the things Steve didn’t particularly want to relive). 

Instead of mentioning any of that, though, Bruce asked instead, “And what about her brother? Uh, Pietro?”

“He died in Sokovia.”

“Oh.” Bruce shifted before mumbling to the seat. “Must’ve missed that.”

It was awkwardly quiet for a moment before Bruce spoke up again. “And Vision… he’s okay?”

_ He’s not a genocidal maniac like Ultron yet _ was the unspoken subtext, but Steve nodded anyway. 

Natasha’s voice was dry. “Don’t worry, Doc, I don’t think anyone’s gonna make you pay child support.”

Bruce shook his head, and Steve felt his fists clench involuntarily in anticipation of what next came out of Bruce’s mouth.

“Okay, but what about Tony?”

Dead quiet.

Steve really wanted Sam and Natasha to stop looking at him, but of course they were still looking at him, and  _ Bruce _ was looking at him too, and it was that more than anything else that made Steve start talking. 

__

* * *

Bruce took the news better than expected. 

He’d looked like he was on the verge of interrupting the entire way through (Sam and Natasha had not restricted themselves to this—they interrupted often, and Steve was more than a little relieved that the entire thing wasn’t on him) but didn’t say a word until the end, when he nodded slowly and said, “And this was…”

Steve stared intently at a loose cord dangling from the ceiling. They should probably fix that, actually, it was probably connected to something important, and the last thing they needed was to mess with the quinjet, now that they couldn’t exactly take it in for repairs. “About a year and a half ago.”

He could practically see all the words passing through Bruce’s head, but the only one Bruce said aloud was, “Okay.”

“That’s it?” Natasha asked. She was leaned back now, her elbow crooked against the arm of the seat. 

Bruce adjusted himself so that he was facing her. “I’m gonna wait until I can talk to Steve and Tony at the same time.”

Sam laughed. “Yeah, that’s not happening any time soon.”

Bruce looked at Steve again. “Have you talked to him?”

Steve gave a half shrug. “I left him a message.”

“But have you talked to him?”

“I sent him a phone.”

“ _ Steve. _ ” Bruce actually reached out to touch Steve’s wrist at that, and Steve snapped to his gaze. “Have you talked to him?”

“No,” Steve admitted. He felt the brush of skin as his wrist was released, a tingling feeling in the place where Bruce’s hand had been. 

“I think you should do that.” Bruce paused. “How did Tony take it?”

Natasha answered that one, her tone as calm and measured as though she were giving a mission report. “Stark Industries is churning out new tech like clockwork—a lot of work in the prosthetics industry.” Sam winced at that, a motion hardly noticeable. “All his media appearances have been promoting this foundation or that. Not many Iron Man sightings, but there hasn’t been too much of a need.” She looked up and sighed at the expression she was greeted with. “We’re  _ fugitives _ , Bruce. We can’t just show up at the compound.”

“Well, we could,” Sam pointed out. “We would just be escorted to a different location very quickly.”

“I could’ve told you what it’s like to deal with General Ross,” Bruce said. 

“He’s the Secretary of State now,” Steve pointed out.

“So now he just has more power to do the same things.”

“Ross wasn’t the one who came up with the Accords,” Natasha said. “They were from the U.N.” She paused. “I signed them.”

Bruce nodded. “And so did Tony and Rhodey and Vision.”

Sam shook his head. “I still don’t understand how the robot was able to sign.”

“Vision is legally recognized as an enhanced individual,” Steve said, but he felt at least a little of the tension dissolve as Natasha’s mouth quirked and Bruce tilted his head as though he were genuinely thinking it over. 

“Yeah, yeah; he still beeps when he’s out of WiFi.”

__

* * *

Bruce didn’t register how much time had passed. All he knew was that at some point, Natasha and Sam had left the jet—he thought somebody had been talking in a hushed voice about “patrol”—and now he and Steve were alone. 

Unless Steve had left, too—no, he was still there. Still hunched over in his seat, as though the phantom weight of the shield was pressing against his back. He apparently didn’t feel the need to fill the silence, and for that, Bruce was grateful.

The conversation had been a lot. At once. A lot. He’d thought the craziest explanation he’d ever have to face was when Thor had woken him up and told him about needing to fight his sister—who was by the way the goddess of death or something completely insane like that—on an alien planet, but this… this hit home on a different level. He supposed he shouldn’t have expected to return after a two-year absence to find everything exactly the same, but he’d at least assumed they’d all have their old rooms in the Tower. 

He just… he had to digest. 

Fortunately for him, one of his main occupational hazards was needing to process huge amounts of new information that had occurred while he was… out of it, and so it didn’t take long for his brain to switch from 

_ what the hell what the hell what the hell  _ to calculating the flight distance between here and New York and wondering if Heimdall would be willing to send down another one of those rainbow bridges. Thinking of Thor as someone who could  _ defuse _ any kind of conflict was a new and somewhat odd experience, but Bruce was more at the point where he was considering the potential benefits of shocking some sense into Steve and Tony. 

He was standing now, unable to sit still any longer, fiddling around with some of the controls on the dashboard. Some of the functions had been disabled—the tracking system being the most notable one. 

Bruce was… familiar with how to turn off the quinjet’s tracking system. 

That was when Steve did break the silence. “Careful, don’t want to take off back to space by mistake.” His voice was trying too hard to stay light, but gave in as he stood up. The curved ceiling cast shadows over his face—a familiar face, set in new lines that Bruce had never realized he had. “Although I’m not sure I could blame you.”

Bruce let his hand slide back down to his side, taking his gaze from the control panel. He and Steve were very much alone in here, and it was odd how, with less people in the jet, the space seemed smaller, as though it were pushing them closer together.

That had always been their dynamic, back when they were all a team—a very odd dynamic, and one that could only exist between two people with their exact unique situations. Steve had given the orders on the battlefield, and Hulk had followed them (for the most part—as far as the Hulk was concerned, the line between malicious compliance and outright noncompliance was a scribble). Off the battlefield, Bruce and Steve had mostly just existed in the same spaces: team dinners and waiting around after debriefs and being the only two awake at the crack of dawn every morning. 

But they’d still had a connection, in their own way. Bruce had been almost completely isolated from the rest of the world between 2005 and 2012, and as such had a gap in his pop culture knowledge that, while nothing compared to Steve’s, was still an opportunity to catch each other’s eye with a knowing look whenever Tony made fun of them for not getting his brilliant references. Both of them were alike in the aspect of having been ordinary the one moment and completely changed the next, unlike the others who were born and trained and built their way into their skill sets. “Greatness thrust upon them,” and all that jazz, except for the times it didn’t feel all that great—and those times, there was the solidarity of knowing there was someone who understood, even if their perceptions were almost polar opposites. 

Also, they totally got each other’s sense of humor. 

Neither of them were making jokes now, though. Far from it. Bruce stared at the loose cord hanging behind Steve’s head (seriously, had any of them planned to fix that?) for a moment before the words finally filtered into his brain.

“Don’t worry, I’ve had enough of space for a while,” Bruce said at last, and his words sounded more hollow than he’d meant them to. 

He tapped a few more times on the control panel before continuing. “I understand how it got to that point, Steve. I really do. I don’t think it had to go that way and I don’t agree with it, but I understand how it happened. I just… I mean, you and Tony were friends. Kind of. Some of the time. Oh, you know what I mean; the Avengers—we were like a family.”

And he couldn’t help the pitiful little voice somewhere in his thoughts, the voice that asked,  _ Right? It wasn’t just me, right? _

The relief when Steve didn’t immediately dismiss him was so strong that he almost missed Steve’s actual response.

Which was, predictably—or, it would’ve been predictable for anybody who’d spent more than five minutes around Steven Rogers’s stubborn ass: “We were.”

A frustrated noise escaped from the back of Bruce’s throat. “Come on, man, you’re better than that.”

Steve shook his head, but whether he’d actually heard what Bruce said and listened enough to disagree with it was unclear. His hands—bare of the protective gloves that normally went with the uniform—came up to hook into his belt. The stance shouldn’t have made him look so captivating—especially not with the crease of his brows and the downcast of his eyes—but for some reason, Bruce couldn’t take his eyes away. 

“Honestly, I thought you’d be mad at me,” Steve said. His mouth did that thing it did—that little sideways quirk quickly buried beneath layers of seriousness. Bruce wondered when that had been developed—speaking before thinking during a mission briefing? Captain America-type press where an image needed to be maintained? When there was no way a teacher would believe that the smallest, scrawniest kid in the class could’ve gotten into a fight and he could get away with it if he  _ just didn’t smile? _

“I mean,” Steve continued, and Bruce forced himself to pay attention to the actual words coming out of his mouth. “You and Tony were like  _ that _ .” Steve crossed two fingers together. 

“Oh, believe me,” Bruce said. “I am mad. I don’t know if I’m mad at you or Tony or any of it—or if I’m just mad at myself—but you should know by now that—”

“That you’re always angry?” The sideways quirk had been replaced by the ghost of a smile.

Bruce returned it. “Well.”

Steve’s hand was on the control panel now too, and Bruce accidentally bumped against it as he slid his own across a hairline crack in the screen.

* * *

By the time Sam and Natasha returned to the campsite, insects were chirping and stars had curtained the inky sky. The quinjet was all but invisible in the dark, their shadows against it only visible by the flashes of white teeth as the four of them talked and laughed and pretended the earlier conversations had never happened. 

After dinner, Natasha and Bruce went off for a “talk” that Steve was not allowed to hear. Sam made his share of teasing comments about that, but somehow Steve was inclined to take them at their word. Neither Natasha or Bruce had worn that expression upon their reunion.

If anything, Bruce had only worn that expression when he’d laid eyes on—

But they’d decided to make their talk private for a reason, and Steve had no business thinking about it, not this much.

So he offered Sam a competition to see who could carry the most firewood back to the jet, and it was there that they waited out the night.

* * *

Lights flashed and crowds roared and fangs snapped and kingdoms erupted like supernovas before Bruce’s closed eyelids that night.

He tossed and turned in his borrowed sleeping roll and tried not to think about Steve fast asleep across the row of seats above him.

* * *

They walked the next day, traipsing up a hill in a broken-link line. They’d slept too late to see the sunrise, but Sam liked to have a jumping-off point to keep his wings in practice and Natasha enjoyed routine more than she would like to admit and Steve enjoyed being alone with his thoughts less than  _ he _ would, and so through the trees they went, no words spoken as long as they were in each other’s company.

Steve glanced back, a couple of times, just to make sure Bruce was keeping up, and found with some surprise that he was. More than that, actually—his movements were sure and careful, and Steve blinked to reconcile the images of the man who regularly lost his glasses on top of his head and the one who was now moving almost as silently as Natasha.

(Because no one could be more silent than Natasha. As he and Sam had discovered many a night when they’d  _ thought _ they were alone)

It took another instant before it clicked that Bruce had been on the run for seven years. That that duck of his shoulders was to keep below the line of fire, that lift of his foot to avoid a potential tripwire, that tilt of his head to listen for the rustle of footsteps or the tread of tires or the whir of blades, that steady in-out-in-out both to keep himself silent and to keep the  _ other _ guy silent. 

Steve could figure all of these out, because he’d seen the similar signs creep up on almost every other teammate he’d ever had (on himself—that was a personal matter). It shouldn’t have thrown him—not unless he’d fallen into the trap of thinking Bruce wasn’t like the rest of them, that he was exactly fifty percent ordinary and fifty percent not. Out of all the memories that had blurred over the past two years, that one deserved to stay fresh. It was easy, sometimes, to miss the strength.

A piece of something crumbled away as he continued to watch. 

* * *

Bruce had been watching the gray clouds slowly coalesce all morning, and so he wasn’t surprised when the tiny sprinkle turned into pounding raindrops that sloughed off the end of tree branches and mixed the circle of dirt around the jet into a syrupy mud.

It was pretty funny to see the other three superheroes run for cover under the wings of the jet, though.

He was the last one to join them, his hoodie already soaked through and water pooling and trickling from his hair down his face. He wrapped his arms close around himself and pressed his back against the smooth outside of the jet, feeling his shoes squish against the rapidly liquefying ground. 

Sam and Natasha were huddled in the doorway, raising their voices even as the wind blew them away. Bruce couldn’t catch any of their discussion, but it was continued from whatever they had been talking about before the rain hit. 

He didn’t bother to listen more closely, however, because Steve was scrunching up next to him, wedging himself as far as he could out of the open air and under the shelter of the quinjet wing. Droplets hung off the tips of blond hair like beads, and Steve was squinting at the sky like it had done him a personal affront.

“I haven’t seen rain in two years,” Bruce realized suddenly. He pulled one hand out of his hoodie pocket and stretched it out in front of him, watching the rain obligingly patter down on it. “Something about Sakaar’s atmosphere must not be compatible.”

Steve spit water out of his mouth. “You’re telling me you missed it?” And that scowl was oh so definitely the product of a childhood in which cold and damp weather almost inevitably meant a week holed up in bed after catching the latest  _ whatever _ -it-was that had come around. 

There was obviously no chance of that now, but Bruce still felt himself smile at Steve’s incredulously put-out expression.

“I missed a lot of things,” he said. “Things you wouldn’t even think about—like, you know how sometimes you get out of bed in the morning because the sunrise comes through your window and wakes you up?”

Steve nodded.

“You can’t do that on a spaceship,” Bruce said simply, and Steve laughed. 

They stood like that for a little while, amicable silence and watching the rain, as memories continued to flip through Bruce’s head.

“Remember that mission where you used your shield as an umbrella?”

“I do.”

“The team didn’t stop teasing you for a week.”

“I was dry, though, wasn’t I?” Steve’s cheeky grin faded back a bit. “I don’t have my shield anymore, you know.”

“Of course you don’t.” He didn’t mean for the warmth in his voice, and he shrugged when Steve turned to him with eyebrows slightly raised.

Their shoulders brushed, and maybe it wasn’t Bruce’s imagination that they both edged a little closer to each other, instinctively seeking someone with which to wait out the rain.

* * *

Fortunately, the rain cleared up after a few hours, but there were still glassy puddles and pockets of squelching mud ringing the campsite at dinner that night.

Steve had dragged out a couple seats from the jet in lieu of sitting on soggy logs—telling, wasn’t it, that he was the only one to think of that—and the four of them currently sat in an oddly shaped semicircle that didn’t at all conform to proper geometry. 

Natasha and Sam were sitting across from each other, tracing lines and crosses in the mud with sticks—a game that both of them were cheating at, so it canceled out—and Bruce was watching them and laughing into his bowl of whatever rations they’d managed to pick up on their last venture into civilization (Turned out, Natasha had about a dozen different credit cards all to different fake names, and Steve really shouldn’t have been surprised).

Bruce finished his meal before Steve was even halfway done, and Steve wondered briefly how much energy it must’ve taken to be the Hulk for two years, and how much food there was to go around on a spaceship containing an entire population. 

That segued into wondering what alien food was like anyway, and Steve decided to shut down that line of thinking after his mind provided him with some kind of cross between spaghetti and Tony’s green smoothies. 

Setting aside his now-empty bowl, Bruce reached down to claim a water bottle from the open supply bag.

Sam looked up from where he’d just dragged a huge circle around two of Natasha’s crosses. “Sorry, man, those are for emergencies. We’re being very environmentally conscious here on Team Captain America.” He frowned down at the patterns in the mud and addressed Natasha. “And you can’t do that, I’ve already made a box here.”

“You’d be surprised to find out how few people set up 7-Elevens in the middle of the woods,” Natasha said to Bruce, before carefully rubbing out Sam’s circle. “And that’s not a box, you have to connect all the sides.”

Sam’s aggrieved “oh, now that it’s  _ my _ turn I have to connect all the sides, I see how it is” muttered in the background as Bruce withdrew his hand from the bag.

Steve was already standing up. “We set up a tarp to collect rainwater thataways; after today’s little shower it should be pretty full. C’mon.”

“Oh, thanks.” Bruce stood and followed him away from the quinjet. The sounds of light and laughter faded away as they stepped deeper into the woods.

It was only a few-minute hike to reach the tarp in question—it was indeed almost full from the rain, and the slices of moonlight sifting through the leaves cast rippling patterns on its dark surface.

Bruce started to fill his container, and it was silent for a moment before he abruptly asked, “Hey, Steve?”

“Yeah?” Steve had hung back once it was clear Bruce could see the tarp, but now he leaned half a step closer. Bruce was a silhouette in the dark, framed against the trees and the shadows and the night. 

“Yesterday. After Sam found me. You said you didn’t think I would come back after Sokovia.”

He looked up at Steve, and the question was obvious in his eyes.

Steve nodded. After half a beat of hesitation, yes, but he nodded. “I meant it. Nat didn’t tell me what happened, but I got enough of the picture.” He paused, working the words around in his mouth. “Tony thought you’d come back. He designed you a room at the compound, if you ever ‘felt like stopping by.’ Those were his words.”

“He’s got a lot more faith in me than I deserve.” Bruce’s eyes cast down to the surface of the water as he drew his container back out.

“I wasn’t surprised when you left,” Steve said. “Some part of me, I guess, always felt that the whole… well, the whole  _ team _ , the six of us—was temporary. One thing about my situation is that you learn not to take things for granted. As much as I hated it.” He shrugged, and that should have been an off-putting gesture in the middle of a conversation like this, but Bruce was watching him with so much understanding that it burned. “Still hate it now, even though I’ve got a lot less to lose. It just feels like everything else grew to fill that space, and eventually I won’t have anything left to hold onto.”

He cleared his throat. It shouldn’t have been this easy to open up like this, to stand face to face with someone else and give them so much, but the sting of regret was suspiciously absent from his tongue as the words dropped out of his mouth, and  _ why  _ was he—

He knew why. He’d known why for six years. 

Maybe it was time to admit it, to act on it, now that there was nothing left to break. 

“Every time I think I know what stability is, what it could be, I’m wrong,” Bruce mused. “You said you weren’t surprised when I left—I don’t think… I don’t think I was, either. I wasn’t in control, and you know the Hulk and I have a… complicated relationship, but he does  _ feel  _ me. We’re each other’s—” A flash as a hand darted up to run through curly hair “—and I’m  _ not explaining this right _ —”

“It’s okay.”

“—but when Thor found me on Sakaar and told me I’d—” Bruce paused and made a half sort of gesture in the air. “—left the team, left the  _ planet _ , run away from all my problems… I wasn’t surprised either.”

“You didn’t leave.” If Steve could speak one thing into existence. “You were afraid.”

“Were you afraid when you left?”

There was a hint of challenge in Bruce’s voice, and so Steve told the truth: “No.”

Bruce nodded, but Steve wasn’t done, and his voice was amazingly quiet as he said, “I wanted you to come back.”

And that bare honesty, out of everything Steve had said, seemed to be the one thing that Bruce couldn’t understand, couldn’t wrap his genius brain around, and he almost took a step backward into the water tarp before he steadied himself.

Steve shook his head. “I always knew you were going to run.” His eyes had drifted down toward the leaves littering the ground, but now they lifted and met another pair of eyes, eyes that were dark and shining with reflection. “But I wanted you to come back.”

As though to match Steve’s quiet, Bruce’s next words came almost in a whisper. “I don’t want to run anymore.”

Somehow they had stepped even closer to each other, two silhouettes in the dark, but Steve could see the glint of the stars in Bruce’s eyes, and he wondered how much closer it was possible for two people to be without—

The kiss, when it came, was soft.

At least, the first one was.

The water container made a muffled thud as it dropped to the ground.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!


End file.
